The Money Scope is a podcast about personal financial decision-making for Canadian professionals. It is hosted by Benjamin Felix and Dr. Mark Soth – the Loonie Doctor.
The site is also peppered with photoshopped fun, like the intro image of this page. Each episode page is deliberately designed to be a multi-media curriculum with annotated transcripts, primary source references, and links to relevant materials in our other blog and podcast formats.
Find out more about us professionally, the lens we bring to The Money Scope, and why we took on this project together in Episode 0 below.
Transcript
- Introduction
- About Dr. Mark Soth
- The Loonie Doctor Blog
- About Benjamin Felix
- Mark’s Biases
- Ben’s Biases
- Mark’s Conflicts of Interest
- Ben’s Conflicts of Interest
- The Money Scope Origin Story
- Where We Plan To Stick The Money Scope
- Deliberate Design
Introduction
[00:00:02] BF: Welcome to the Money Scope Podcast, shining a light deep inside personal finance for Canadian professionals. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Portfolio Manager and Head of Research at PWL Capital, and Dr. Mark Soth, aka The Loonie Doctor.
With this being the first-ever episode of the Money Scope podcast, we’re going to spend some time introducing ourselves, what this podcast is about, why we’re here, and some notes on our personal biases and conflicts of interest. We want to make sure that you, the listener, understand what you’re getting into with us here, the perspectives that each of us brings to personal finance, and how we plan to present those perspectives together.
Mark, how about you start by telling us about yourself?
About Dr. Mark Soth
[00:00:42] MS: My name is Mark Soth, and I’m a mid-career practicing physician. I work mostly in the ICU now, but I’ve also done some general medicine and respirology in the past. In the non-clinical part of my practice, I do teaching and some physician leadership and clinical administration in our department at the hospital. Over the course of my career, I love building things. So I have built some educational courses in my field over time. Then within our department, I like to find and solve problems. So I’ve looked at the way we provide care around our hospital over the past decade and a half, and help to try to build services and pull those together into a clinical department. So that’s the career aspect of what I do for my job.
Outside of that, I’ve tried to juggle that along with all of the other roles in my life. So I’m a husband and a son and a friend and father for my family. So I’ve been trying to balance all of that together with the work that I do as a physician. I will say that that is overwhelming at times, but it’s also challenging and rewarding. I feel that I need to share that aspect of it too because I know that a lot of us feel that way at times. It’s not something we always talk about because we don’t want to show that we have any weaknesses. But it is important because it’s not a unique thing. It’s not unique to professionals or small business owners either. But it can feel unusual because we often don’t talk about it. We often talk about how great our careers are and how wonderful things are going. But it can be a challenge as well.
It’s also one of those things that outside of a profession or a field of practice or any kind of business. It’s hard for a lot of people that aren’t part of that to understand all the things that go on behind the scenes to make that work. With that, money is also a bit of a taboo topic sometimes. So I think it’s really important for us to discuss that. Not only does that keep us out of trouble in terms of things like burnout. When you talk about burnout and all the ways that we can try to remedy that, it really requires you to have a strong financial position to actually put a lot of major changes into practice. If you don’t have a strong financial position, that really exacerbates the situation further because you don’t have as much control over it.
So I really think this is an important thing for us to talk about, not only from the burnout mental health aspect but also to move our career in positive directions. If you have a strong financial footing, then you’re able to take your career, your business, or whatever it is that you’re doing with your work and try to move that in directions that you think are important. But you really need to have that basis there. So that’s who I am and what I kind of bring to the table from my background perspective.
The Loonie Doctor Blog
[00:03:23] BF: With that context, how did you decide to start The Loonie Doctor blog?
[00:03:26] MS: Well, I’ve always had some projects on the go, and a bunch of them are actually reaching maturity at the same time. So the department that I was helping to lead, there’s lots of other people who could do a great job to take it up to the next level. There is other educational projects which had sort of passed on to other people to carry forward.
So there’s a space there that I could fill with something, and I had a passing interest in personal finance up to that point. This is around 2017, and I decided I better start paying more attention to that. As I did that, I started to learn more about it. It’s important to have that perspective because most of us, when we’re starting out, where we’ve spent so much time putting into building our careers and our families, we haven’t had a lot of extra bandwidth to spend time looking after our personal and learning about personal finances too. When you do that as a business owner or a professional, it takes on an entirely different layer there.
So it’s not too late to start learning about it. Most of us don’t learn about it right at the beginning. But the sooner you learn about it the better. So I was trying to learn about it. I found a vacuum there of information. There’s lots of information on the Internet about personal finance and investing and those types of things. So I did find lots of information about that, but I wasn’t able to really define a lot about how it works for incorporated professionals or people that are higher income tax brackets because we do face some different issues.
I found articles that may be very, very basic, followed by call us for a consultation to learn more. Or there be some articles that are really kind of confusing and very, very technical, which probably would scare me off to want to go let someone else just do it because it’s way too scary for me. Or I’d read and find after I was learning more that there’d be a lot of articles who write about part of the story but omit major alternatives.
That aspect kind of got me a little worked up because there’s a lot of complex products and strategies out there that sound like a great idea. They get heavily marketed as a great idea for business owners and hiring professionals to save on taxes, but there’s also less expensive and more flexible alternatives. So that aspect got me started looking at it as something to fill, and I think there’s a few other things that make us particularly vulnerable to that gap of knowledge, which I think is part of I really felt compelled to start writing about it.
When we have a high income, and you have some passing financial literacy, most of us want to feel financially sophisticated because we feel sophisticated in our professional fields and other aspects of our lives. So that makes us great prospects to sell us complex sophisticated type of products, whether that’s the right answer for us or not. So I think filling that void is important. Otherwise, it gets filled by other information.
From a non-financial standpoint, the more time I spent looking at this and reflecting about personal finance, the reason why we do all of that is actually to help support our lives and our careers and our families and try to move all that into where we actually want to go. I think from a non-financial standpoint, we face a lot of pressures and other things that happen to us as high-income professionals. We’ve invested a lot into our career, so really it’s kind of a part of our identity. So the whole idea that we try to save and invest so that we can pull the ripcord and get out of our career as fast as possible doesn’t really have the same appeal to all of us, as it might to some other people.
But because of the fact we have a higher income and we have some control over the work that we do, that’s great. It’s a major advantage. But at the same time, it can be enough rope to tie ourselves up into because we have the choices to make. We’re not limited in some ways, and that can actually allow us to go down paths and get ourselves tied up more so than if we had limits put in the in place there. So it’s a good thing and also has to be used responsibly, I guess, I would say. The only way we could do that is we actually spend some time thinking about it, which most of us don’t if we’re just kind of in survival mode, getting from day to day, putting out the fires, and putting our head down and just kind of grinding away at things.
All those factors together, I was kind of at a point in my life where I was starting to try to figure those out myself, and writing The Loonie Doctor blog was a way for me to kind of organize my thoughts and share them with other people. Then it’s kind of been able to over time help me move some of it into a positive direction too. When I started writing it, I was actually pretty burnt out and was really looking to change how I did things in a better direction. So it was kind of a process for me in a therapeutic kind of way.
I still chuckle because I actually look back when I was on the Rational Reminder Podcast in 2019, and there was a comment back, and you’re allowed to put comments in the way that was organized. There was a comment something along the lines of, “It’s great that you have someone who’s figured it all out on as a guest, but you should have more guests who are struggling with everything.” I think it’s important to disabuse anybody of that notion right away. I certainly didn’t have it all figured out then, and I still don’t have it all figured out now. I’m kind of working my way through it. You can see that as I work through things on my blog as well.
I think the other big side effect of starting to write about it and do blogs, I’ve connected with other people that are doing the same sort of thing but in different ways. There’s Facebook groups and podcasts and videos. That’s how I came across you, Ben, as well. So that’s been great for helping me out and I think helping everybody else out.
About Benjamin Felix
So with that, I’m going to say we should hear a bit more about you. I know you’ve been an active educator in personal finance for a number of years now. You take a very rigorous academic type of approach and really break things down in an understandable way with you’ve had the Common Sense Investing YouTube channel, Rational Reminder Podcast, white papers. You also do this while working as a financial advisor, portfolio manager, and Head of Research at PWL. So this is something you’ve been doing, in addition to all of that. What made you to move in that kind of direction?
[00:09:16] BF: I studied engineering first. I didn’t start out with a passion for personal finance. I remember when I started learning about finance, I felt like a bit of a deer in the headlights because I’d studied engineering. You don’t learn a whole lot about business or finance when you study engineering. Presumably similar to studying medicine, you’re not learning about finance or investing or anything like that.
I was playing basketball in the States at the time, and I ended up in Ottawa at Carleton University because I – for basketball reasons. I had to pick an academic program, so I decided to do an MBA because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but didn’t necessarily want to be an engineer. So I didn’t want to go the master’s in engineering route.
MBA led me to doing an internship at a mutual fund dealership. Coming from the background of engineering, where ethics are extremely important and the decision-making process is extremely important, the conflicts of interest, the relative lack of decision-making processes, and the lack of evidence more generally was a major turnoff. So I kind of looked at financial services and was like, “Wow, that’s it. It’s a bit of a mess.”
Then I kept learning through my MBA program, which I was still doing through that internship and my own reading. I learned that there are these whole fields of financial economics, which is an academic field of study looking at, among other things, how people should save and invest their money and household finance, which looks specifically at household financial decisions and how they can be made optimally.
Then I continue to learn that there are actual firms like PWL, where I work now, that take that type of research and try to use it to help their clients make better decisions. That learning that there was a way to do this stuff well is what kind of kept my foot in the door of financial services. When I first started and I got a glimpse of what that industry looks like or this industry looks like, I was ready to run far, far away and go find some type of engineering-related job. But when I started to learn that there’s a way to do it all well and that there are people trying to do it that way, I got pretty excited. I still think it’s pretty exciting.
I started writing about that, about good financial decision-making back in 2012 when I was still doing my MBA. Having a blog actually helped convince PWL to hire me when I applied. Cameron, who I host the Rational Reminder Podcast with, I think Google searched me when I applied for a job. He found my blog, and he said something along the lines of appreciating my ability to communicate these topics. That was one of the things that kind of convinced him to hire me.
PWL is super supportive of content and podcasting and all this kind of stuff and of research, which makes it a really good fit for me personally. It facilitates cool projects like this podcast that we’re working on now.
[00:11:59] MS: Yes. It’s great. I don’t think anybody’s going to hire me based on my blog.
[00:12:04] BF: I don’t know, Mark. Your blog’s pretty good.
[00:12:06] MS: I don’t know. I have a lot of fun with it. I try to make it a little bit interesting. My wife’s always a little terrified whenever I do a podcast or an article because she’s afraid I’m going to say something to get myself in trouble. So I have to be aware of that I’m going to be Googled at points in time as well. But that’s great. I’m glad. That’s great to hear how that worked out for your career path. That’s awesome
Mark’s Biases
I guess this is probably a good part for us to talk a little bit about our biases and our conflicts of interest. I think that’s important anytime we’re going to do any type of material. I mean, for me and I know for Ben as well, we challenge our thoughts and try to form our opinions based on the best evidence that we’ve got around that we’re able to find, which sometimes is okay. Sometimes, it’s not great. Then all of that, of course, is influenced by our experience. I know that my thoughts and many topics have shifted as I’ve learned more about it.
But it’s important to know about that because, subconsciously, it may affect how we look into and present some of the material. We try to lay that out in advance to try to minimize that impact. But I think it’s important for you as listeners to know a bit about what our biases are so that you can piece together what we’re saying and see how that fits in with other sources of information that you may be getting, which, of course, will have their own biases, whether they acknowledge them or not. So I think putting that on the table is really important for us.
For me, one of my strong biases is towards DIY investing. However, I also feel a lot of us should have – probably most of us should really benefit from an outside opinion as well, in addition to that. So I think we can manage a lot of the nuts and bolts of the investing piece of how we manage our financial lives, just like we manage our budgets. But having someone else provide insight into that, I think, can be helpful.
I’ve been through a variety of advisor models through my lifetime at this point, and I’ve come back to DIY investing for both the advisor and the investing roles. But at some point, I’m probably going to end up using a fee-only advisor again. Or I may even move our portfolio to a full-service advisor, as long as they’re cost-conscious and have an evidence-based approach. I’ll probably do that when I get a bit older, just to make it easier for my wife and I, if one of us passes away, to have someone else external helping us with our finances. So I do have a bias towards DIY but also recognize the value of some outside opinions and help with that at times.
I do think that when we do seek out those types of relationships, it’s really, really important for us to have a strong knowledge base. I’ve already kind of mentioned that, but I think advisors can really add a lot of value for goal setting and motivating and behavioural coaching with our investments, and pulling together the nuts and bolts of a plan with some of the math that goes behind that, and helping us to navigate that.
I don’t think it’s the value values really in special products or special investments that they may have. Those are things that get sold or managed. I think the biggest thing is how we interfaced. To understand that, we really have to and get the most of it. We have to understand a bit about it to be an educated patient, so to speak. I do think that financial advisors face some challenges dealing with us that are similar to some of the challenges that we may face dealing with their patients.
For example, I mean, lifestyle is a major determinant of health. But we often get caught up on the drugs or the procedures that we spent so much time learning about. We spend so much time learning about and training with these approaches that we may have a tendency to lean on them. I think financial advisors may have the same thing from the way that they’re trained. So it’s important for us to recognize the different options out there because we may need to know when a simple procedure may be better than the exciting one.
For the finances, I’d take the Money Scope over financial open heart surgery any day, even though one’s probably more exciting than the other. We’ll do our best with this podcast to make the Money Scope exciting, but I think we have to be aware of the options. Sometimes, simpler is better. That’s another one of my biases, which you may think ironic if you check out my website, and you see all the different calculators in Excel, things that I’ve done in the background. But again, that’s been trying to make what are complicated procedures into more simplified ones, where you can put in some basic inputs and outputs that are actually understandable. That’s where my biases are.
I also really think that we have to understand about this to be able to manage the day-to-day aspects of our financial plan. I mean, only we are going to understand what our goals are really. Only we make the day-to-day decisions about the work that we do, the income that we earn, and the things that we spend our money on. If we understand that that’s going to be important for us to be able to implement that because all that day-to-day type of action and decision making that we make is what actually leads to a bigger long-term successful plan. Those would be my biases, and I know Ben’s going to talk a few about his.
Ben’s Biases
[00:16:50] BF: It would be, I don’t know what I would call it, stereotypical for me to have a bias toward the opposite saying, “Well, no. Everybody needs national financial advice,” because of my career and what I do professionally. But I don’t really think that’s the case. I agree with your perspective, Mark, which I think is you started that out saying that you have a bias toward DIY. But I think you’d offered a much more nuanced perspective, which I think I would echo. I have seen, and here’s where I may have a bias or where a bias may come through in some of my thinking.
I have seen that DIY is not for everyone. I would consider this more of a selection bias than a personally held bias because just by nature of the people who come to a firm like PWL seeking help are maybe people who would not be successful as do-it-yourself investors or who have not been successful as do-it-yourself investors. So I would call that a selection bias in my lived experience about the role that financial advice can or in some cases should play.
You think about it, and personal finance is no joke. It’s long-term decisions. There are serious behavioural and cognitive biases. There’s a financial product landscape that can be described as a complexity minefield. You talked about simplicity being one of your biases, which I completely agree with. But it’s actually really interesting research on this, on complexity being one of the ways that fields like financial services that are pretty competitive and where consumers may be cost-conscious. Complexity is one of the ways that financial product providers can charge higher fees. So that’s a major issue.
As much as I’d love to say that for people who DIY isn’t right for, they can just go and get financial advice, and that’s the kind of easy solution. It’s also more complicated than that because in a lot of cases, financial advisors will exhibit the exact same errors in their own accounts as the clients that they’re supposed to be helping. I mean, there’s basic stuff. They trade more frequently than they should. But financial advisors do, in their personal accounts, as well as in their clients’ accounts, they chase returns. They invest in a high-fee actively managed mutual funds. They under-diversify their portfolios.
There’s research actually specific to Canada showing that advisors often have the exact same biases that their clients would have. So in that case, they’re not really helping. My position generally, and I’m just trying to talk through where my biases may be here, is that financial advisors can theoretically be very helpful because not everyone is equipped to do their own investing and unassisted financial decision-making, especially with all the biases that can get in the way.
But the profession hub financial advice has a lot of shortcomings from a regulatory perspective and a low barriers to entry perspective, which I guess is related to regulation. So it makes it hard to say that financial advice is unconditionally beneficial. The other thing that you said, Mark, that I really agree with is that when people do choose to seek advice, I think it is really important for them to come with a strong knowledge base of their own to avoid some of the issues that I mentioned where financial advisors can cause more problems than they solve. I think being able to at least notice when something may not be right is extremely important, and there’s evidence supporting that too.
More knowledgeable investors are actually more likely to seek advice, and they’re more likely to benefit from advice when they get it. Because of the conflicts of interest that can exist in financial services, I think investors need to be able to at a baseline assess whether an advisor that they’re interviewing has interests that are in line with their own. I don’t know if those are biases there, but I just wanted to talk through my position on that topic of where I could potentially have a bias based on what I do for a living.
[00:20:18] MS: I think that’s a really great perspective to offer kind of from the inside aspect, along with the evidence that goes along with what actually people do. I mean, it’s like with physicians, there’s – we know what a healthy lifestyle looks like, but there’s people that despite knowing we do our best but we’re all human and still make the same kind of errors. For you as a person who’s going to be a consumer, to be aware of that so you can recognize that for yourself, I think, is also – yes, it’s really important.
Mark’s Conflicts of Interest
Next thing besides bias to talk about would be about our financial conflicts of interest. So I mean, for me, vast majority of my income comes from practicing medicine. At this point, I’m also financially independent for my investment standpoint. But I do get some small amount of income that comes from speaking engagements. I’ve mentored colleagues in an unofficial way with DIY investing or financial dilemmas for years more as an emotional support person or a sounding board, not really specific investing advice. I’m not qualified to do that. But it’s been kind of an unofficial colleague type of thing that I’ve done.
That led to me recently becoming a Qtrade affiliate which means that Qtrade is a discount brokerage. There’s a whole bunch of them out. Qtrade and Questrade and all the big banks have their own different versions of them, but I’ve affiliated with Qtrade, which means that people that open on a Qtrade account via the link on my website, I get a small referral fee at no cost to the user for that happening.
So there is a financial piece there. It’s pretty small in the bucket compared to everything that I do, but it is there. I mean, the main reason for me to actually take on that relationship was because I’ve made it easier for me to build material for my website. I’ve had contact people there where I can build materials screenshots and sort through some of the places where people get stuck commonly and help develop material for people to get unstuck easier because I know the platform really well. So that’s been one of the big reasons why I did that, and their customer service is also good too.
One of the last things that I want if someone’s trying to learn how to DIY invest is get stuck on something silly or have a bad customer service experience that turns them off when, otherwise, they would have done just fine at it. So that’s my main conflict of interest that’s relates to what we’re talking about here. I don’t really have any other paid advertising on my website and have decided not to really do that unless – that may change down the road if I find some way that really adds a lot of specific value to the people that are reading my website. But I don’t want that kind of material to clutter out what I’m trying to deliver from an educational material standpoint. [Update November, 2023: I have allowed two more sponsor’s for The Loonie Doctor: BMO ETFs & PWL Capital Inc. I explain why & my ground rules here.]
Ben’s Conflicts of Interest
[00:22:51] BF: That makes sense. That’s something we’ve grappled with on Rational Reminder too is whether to accept ads. In what circumstances would we do that? That’s an interesting thing to think about. My financial conflicts of interest are more significant than my bias disclosure, I think, because I am an employee and a shareholder of PWL Capital, which is a Canadian wealth management firm. Our revenue model can best be described as fee-based. So we’re not really selling products and earning missions, but we do charge an ongoing fee as a percentage of our clients’ assets in exchange for our portfolio management and ongoing financial advice.
That creates a conflict of interest because it’s good for PWL as a firm and for me as a shareholder and employee, personally, when people decide to delegate their portfolio management and financial advice to us. That said, I don’t earn commissions or bonuses or anything like that when somebody becomes a client. So I have nothing to sell really, but I do receive, obviously, a salary. PWL does distribute a portion of its earnings to shareholders of which, as I mentioned, I am as a dividend each year. So my personal income is tied directly to a service that people would use if they wanted to not be do-it-yourself investors. That is an important conflict to disclose.
The Money Scope Origin Story
[00:24:08] MS: I think we have our biases and conflicts. I do also think that we’re really kind of coming to this with the right idea of why we’re doing this series. So I think we’ll explain a little bit about that. Ben and I kind of had contact off for the last few years because it’s funny. I’ll ask a question of him, or he’ll send something to me. It’s literally one over the other of us will be looking at exactly the same problem at the same time in parallel.
For example, there’s a white paper that Ben just came out with about IPPs and salary and dividends from corporations. I remember when I first saw it. I literally had an Excel document open on my computer. I was trying to build a way of modelling exactly what they were working on. So we’ve been working in parallel in a lot of those sort of background type of topics. We’ve also been working in parallel with a lot of our educational type of initiatives as well.
I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to do this podcast series together. So I was really grateful that you got the ball rolling on this, Ben. Perhaps you could explain a little bit about why we thought this was an important project to take on.
[00:25:08] BF: I’ve spent the last five or so years building the Rational Reminder Podcast with Cameron Passmore, who I work with at PWL. Mark, as you mentioned earlier, you were a guest back on episode 73. At the time we’re recording this, we’re up to episode 250-something. So it’s crazy how many episodes we’ve done. Podcasting has been just an incredible medium because, and you mentioned this earlier, Mark, about your blog, it forces a cadence of research and of structured thinking and of being able to communicate that structured thinking for the host. But then at the same time, it’s building a community of people with similar interests.
Mark, we had one of our early interactions when you came on our podcast, and that’s something that just wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have that medium in existence. Then we also get incredible feedback from our listeners that helps the podcast get better and helps us figure out which directions we need to be going in for future research.
Now, the problem that arose, and it’s kind of funny to call it a problem, our podcast audience grew a lot. We launched Rational Reminder as a – I wouldn’t quite say on a whim but I literally went into Cameron’s office, and I was like, “Hey, we should try doing a podcast.” He was like, “Okay,” and we started recording episodes. The audience grew within Canada quickly, but then it also grew outside of Canada quickly. So now, it’s got this large global audience where more than half of our listeners are outside of Canada.
It’s incredible because it’s a relatively large podcast at this point, where we can get some pretty cool guests on. We also know that a lot of very smart people listen, and we get incredible feedback from that audience. So that part of it has been amazing, but it’s also constrained us and our ability to do really niche Canadian content in general. Then even more so within that, doing stuff on Canadian corporations, which is even niche within Canada. It wouldn’t make sense for us to talk about those kinds of topics on that podcast.
We actually even changed our introduction on Rational Reminder. It used to say a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making for Canadians. Enough of our audience petitioned, basically, to have us change the introduction to saying from two Canadians instead of for Canadians because so many of them weren’t Canadian, and they didn’t feel included. So we changed that.
Before I reached out to you, Mark, I’d gotten a request to have you back on Rational Reminder to talk about investing in a corporation from a Canadian. I was like, “I would love that, but we just can’t. It just wouldn’t make sense to cover that topic.” I kept thinking about it, and I kept thinking about how much I enjoy your blog and, like you said, how useful it always is when we bounce ideas off of each other.
Then we’d actually spoken kind of side by side or together at some online conferences for physicians. So I had this idea in my head that, wouldn’t it be cool kind of thing for me and Mark to do a podcast together targeted at this specific niche that Rational Reminder just can’t cover at this point in time? So I had this idea of bouncing around my head for a while. Then I got that message from somebody asking to have you back on the podcast, and that was kind of what gave me the push to reach out. I had no idea what you’d say. I braced myself for rejection when I reached out. So I was super excited when you agreed. Then we’ve had a ton of fun since then preparing this thing.
[00:28:13] MS: Oh, yes. It’s been great. There’s no way that I would have passed up on the opportunity to take this on together. I actually felt really lucky to have slipped into the Rational Reminder before all the Nobel laureates and astronauts and then other people came into it. It’s kind of how I feel about medical school a lot of the time now too. So really thrilled that we could do this project together, and it really advances what my mission is, which is to empower Canadian professionals. By that, I mean not just physicians, but there’s a whole slew of us across multiple fields to take charge of our financial lives.
So I’m really, really excited about this. I’m very passionate about this whole project. A lot of us pour most of our efforts into honing our craft and starting our business. We started level zero regarding personal finance, which there’s no shame in that. That’s where most of us start out. I think it’s really important for us to try to move that forward. Not only do we owe that to ourselves. We owe that to our families because a lot of us and our families give up a lot to support our careers. We have to take – if we can make our money work to advance everything for ourselves and our families the best we can, I think that’s really important.
The other reason that I think this is important, it’s not really about making rich people richer. I mean, this is about helping ourselves, our families, and our broader communities. Because if you look at who the population of professionals are, these are smart, driven, creative people who go out there and make major changes in their fields. They usually have big influences on their families and their communities. If we can take that population and help them build a really strong financial position, then that just leverages everything that they can do. If we can help them to reflect and we can have more awareness of what we’re doing with our money, we can really unleash all of that potential. I think we’re both really excited about taking this project forward.
[00:30:03] BF: Definitely. I agree with everything you said. Now, Mark, you came up with the title. When I saw your message about the title, I was like, “Wow, that is perfect.” Can you explain why we are calling this podcast the Money Scope podcast?
[00:30:16] MS: Yes. I think that message was probably at like two in the morning or something. I was actually in the middle of a call week. You’d contacted me earlier about doing this together, and I was really excited. I was actually fishing something out of someone’s lungs using this instrument called a bronchoscope, which is anytime we want to take a deep dive into a different part of someone’s body, we usually use some kind of scope.
A bronchoscope is one that we use to look inside the bronchus inside the lungs. So it’s like a flexible video camera, essentially. It’s kind of long like a little – it’s about as thick as a worm. It’s like a long worm with a light on its nose. We have different scopes for different purposes. So there’s bigger ones for other body parts. The bronchoscope is like the worm, and a colonoscope is kind of like an anaconda with a light on its nose. I was thinking, well, this would be a great way to take a deep dive into different parts of finance. So we could use like a scope to do that.
The other reason why I think it relates to money is that when we talk about scopes, they’re often the punch line for a lot of doctor jokes about money because they’re also pretty lucrative procedures, and they’re fun to do as well. So I think we’re going to talk about money, we’re going to have some fun, and we’re going to take a deep dive. So I thought using a scope to do that was the right way to do it.
Also, it has like a lot of good connotations with it. So we’re going to do deep dive. We’re going to shed some light. Then the tagline is the Money Scope podcast shining a light deep inside personal finance for Canadian professionals. I think that hits a lot of important points there. It’s not going to be superficial. We are going to get into some deeper topics, try to make that understandable and actually applicable to your lives. It’s about – personal finance is not just about investing because personal finance is the bigger piece, and investing is just one small piece of that.
I also like the fact that it’s Canadian professionals because even though I write as a physician, and that’s kind of the perspective that I bring to the table, I know from my audience and a lot of people that I talk to, both within independent professions or other high-income professions and just regular people, a lot of the people across different realms, I think of all of these topics appeal to them. So the broader we can keep it, the better.
That’s also why we kept high income out of the name too because I think it’s not just for high-income earners, and plus that term really means different things to different people. I think it’s all relative. There’s always going to be someone who makes more than you, and there’s always going to be someone who makes less than you do. So I think we kind of hit all those spots with the name and the tagline.
This is something we’ve been working on. Ben and I have actually both been working on core financial curriculums, and we commented about how we’re often doing things in parallel. So we both actually have curriculums we’ve been building, and we’re hoping to bring this focused curriculum together for this series to give an overview of personal finance that’s relevant to us. Ben, do you want to just cover a little bit about what some of the territory that we’re hoping to cover with the podcast?
Where we plan to shove, I mean stick, The Scope
[00:33:02] BF: I have been working on separate from this project and, like you said, Mark, in parallel with you a curriculum as an introduction to personal finance generally speaking for Canadians approximately but relevant to other people too. But this is really an opportunity for us to build a curriculum that’s targeted specifically at Canadians, and Canadian professionals, including but not limited to, like you just explained, doctors. So that means that we will cover topics that are mostly relevant to this niche audience.
I mean, probably the best example of that is there’s a few episodes that will be pretty deep into the specifics of corporations and a lot of the issues related to that. That’s as niche as it gets, and that’s the kind of thing that it just wouldn’t make sense for us to talk about in our other podcast with a broader audience. So we’re going to start with an introduction. We’re going to start after this introductory episode with an overview of how time, money, and happiness are related.
I think that’s a really important place to start because – and you mentioned this earlier, Mark, good financial decisions need to start with thoughtfully created objectives. Money matters because it facilitates the life that you want to live. But you need to understand what the life that you want to live looks like to start making good financial decisions. So we spent quite a bit of time preparing that topic, and I do think it’s a really important place to start.
Then after that, we have a broad overview of just the general concepts of debt saving and investing and how all of that works over your lifetime and how those different parts work together over time, which, again, I think is a very important framework to give people, just to think about all the stuff. Then we’re going to do a deeper dive into investments, which I think people will enjoy that topic from a more general perspective but still for Canadians.
Then we’re going to touch on managing a portfolio and tax planning. In that episode, we’re starting to get pretty Canadian-specific. Then we’ve got to focus on corporations, including investing in a corporation, taking compensation from a corporation, so salary versus dividends and all that kind of stuff and different ways to withdraw big money tax efficiently from a corporation.
Then in the final episodes, we have topics on insurance, retirement planning, and building a team of professionals, including the do-it-yourself or hire-a-professional advisor decision. Now, that’s our sort of current overview at the time that we’re recording this introductory episode. But we may add topics. I don’t think we’ll remove any of the topics that are in there now, but we’ve talked about adding things like estate planning and maybe adding things like raising kids with money.
On that note, we are open to feedback as we start rolling episodes out. If there are things that people really want to hear about or things that people want us to do differently, we’re more than happy to hear that type of feedback. We also had some good discussion early on when we started talking about this idea about the episode format, which I think is important and how the information is presented because we are taking some pretty deep dives with our Money Scope on some pretty complex topics. We want to make sure that we have a format that’s going to help these complex topics stick in people’s minds. So we’re applying some educational theory and what we hope to be a relatable angle. Which, again, Mark, on your blog, I think you kill it with being relatable. I think we’ll be okay there.
Now, Mark, you had some thoughts on format from your clinical teaching.
Deliberate Design
[00:36:09] MS: There’s a few things with clinical teaching that I think are really relevant when we try to present some of this material. One of them is that we want to make it personally relatable, as you mentioned. It’s really important to closely temporarily link knowledge to applications. So when you’re learning about something, it really helps you to remember it and apply it if you also have some application that’s close to the time that you’re learning about it.
I mean it’s hard for us to do that with finance in many ways, but the way we’re going to try to do it is we’ll deliver a knowledge-based segment. Lay out some information to try to understand the topic the best that we can. We’ll give our different perspectives to that. I mean, you bring a really academically rigorous approach to that. I try to make things – I come from a clinical question usually and kind of work my way backward and learn along the way. So we’re going to hopefully try to translate for each other from those two different ends.
Then we’re going to go through an illustrative case or some cases to try to apply that knowledge. Depending on the topic and how it works just with the way we set up the podcast, so maybe some personal perspectives on something, or it could be some discrete cases at the end. So I’m going to try to put together some challenging ones about things that I always get asked about and I know you’re going to – you have a broad experience of questions you get asked all the time. So we’re going to try to put those together into some cases, hoping with some clinical cases, I think, vignettes that it might help you to think about how the knowledge relates to you as well.
It may not relate to you right this very second either. Maybe later on it’s going to be important for you. But at least it gives you a bit of a chance to start mentally grappling with it. Even if it’s not relatable to you right now, you know where you can find it later on. I think that’s going to be important because no one’s going to get everything out of these episodes the first time that they listen to them, and we’re going to try to organize things for that.
[00:37:53] BF: As I mentioned, we are going to be taking some really deep dives. I mean really deep. This is the kind of thing where, Mark, you and I have spent many, many hours researching these topics.
[00:38:04] MS: Yes. Don’t worry. We’ll give you some sedation.
[00:38:06] BF: Yes, yes, yes. Hopefully, our voices are calming, and it can act as sedation. But it’s not the kind of thing that you can just go and Google for a lot of the stuff, unless you find Mark’s blog, I guess, or maybe one of my papers. It’s not the kind of thing that you can kind of casually research. We recognize that, and we don’t want to minimize the complexity. But I think with cases and examples and, hopefully, with our presentation being not too boring, I think we’ll be okay.
We’ve been having a lot of fun. I think I mentioned this earlier. Writing the episodes and preparing the content and figuring out how we’re going to organize it and present it. We also have some good ideas for the transitions from the deep dives to the cases and between the introduction and the episode.
[00:38:42] MS: Yes. Anybody who’s spent any time scoping will know there’s a plethora of fun sounds during their procedure that we can draw from. But don’t worry. Our producers have kept us in line, but we are going to try to have some fun with the podcast as well.
[00:38:54] BF: Yes. We definitely want to have some fun, and we do plan to break the material into digestible chunks and index them so that they’re easy to find and come back to later. There are a few reasons for that. As I’ve been mentioning, the material is dense, and that’s not something that we can sugarcoat, even if we wanted to. We don’t expect everyone to listen through and get everything they can the first listen through an episode. So we want it to be easy to find bits and pieces when you come back to it later.
I think that’s one of the things you’ve mentioned to me, Mark, about our Rational Reminder Podcast is that if an episode’s an hour and 30 minutes long, and there’s one little tidbit that you want to go back and find, it’s not always easy to do that. So that’s a problem that we definitely want to solve with the way that we set this podcast up. We do expect a cluster of listeners to be advanced, do-it-yourself investors, or financial services professionals, the type of people that other people turn to for information. So we want those people, those, I guess, influential type people to be able to easily point people right back to the relevant section. You want to learn about whatever, corporate taxation of foreign dividends. We want it to be easy to go and find that exact spot in the podcast.
I also want to mention that this podcast is one piece of a larger ecosystem that we’ve been trying to build to help people learn more and make better decisions with their time and money. So being able to connect the dots between the other pieces of that ecosystem I think should be helpful. I mean, we have like the Rational Reminder Podcast that we mentioned. We have your Loonie Doctor blog that we mentioned, this podcast that we’re working on. Then we have a ton of information sources that we’ll be linking to as well. So we want to make sure that connecting the dots between all of those different pieces of information is as straightforward as possible.
[00:40:25] MS: We do try to make everything that we say as backed up with as much evidence as possible. So even though the podcast is conversational for those that are looking to dig deeper into primary research, we’re going to have a list of references on the episode page. I mean, I can say it, for the first episode, there’s already over 90 references there. So you can rest assured we aspire to be evidence-based as much as we can. But you also – if you really want to greatly appraise the literature on your own, we try to make that easier to find too with our reference lists.
So, I think that about wraps up our pre-op assessment for the episode, and the room’s ready for the procedure. I know, Ben, that you need those hands on the Money Scope. So we’ll wrap it up there.